Faith is not enough: A response to the Baltes-Schaie claim that intelligence does not wane.

Faith has been defined as unfounded belief in the occurrence of the improbable. This seems to describe well the adherence of P. B. Baltes and K. W. Schaie (see PA, Vol 52:5053; also Schaie—Vol 53:7133) to a claim that little or no important age-related intellectual decline occurs. In replying to criticisms of their arguments that such decline is myth, the present paper argues that Baltes and Schaie (1976) have (a) obscured the basic points at issue by raising diversionary questions about plasticity and "dialectical posture"; (b) advanced the untenable argument that the search for lawful explanation of complex phenomena is futile; (c) fallaciously argued that criticisms are suspect unless they are based on a "theory-free" inductive interpretation of findings; (d) ignored results indicating decline and positive bias in the very data cited to support their argument for the myth of intellectual decline; (e) failed to explain what is systematic about the significance of the omnibus F test for cohort "effects," beyond what can parsimoniously be accounted for in terms of the confounded age variable; (f) not responded to reasoning suggesting that between-cohort differences in education, if these account for important intellectual variation, should be reflected in a manner contrary to what is actually observed; and (g) asserted that no statistically reliable age decrement occurs in a set of data for which analyses demonstrate statistically significant linear decline. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)